


Gold tipped and hollow

by notnatural



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Guardian Angels, F/F, Internalized Homophobia, Light Angst, Not Canon Compliant, Rare Pairings, Sad Ending, i love them, it wasn't fucking supposed to be that but something happened and well, it's sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-11
Updated: 2017-07-11
Packaged: 2018-11-18 11:55:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11290215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notnatural/pseuds/notnatural
Summary: It's a powerful thing, to be loved by an angel.





	Gold tipped and hollow

It's spring when Maia sees her for the first time. The first time Maia meets Isabelle, Isabelle has already known Maia for the whole of her existence. She feels western wind lift up her hair and smells fireworks and chemicals.

Isabelle is a girl and she's twelve years old. Isabelle is eternity wrapped in a pinprick of nothing. Isabelle is the tug in Maia's soul that keeps her away from dark alleyways and bad people - but Maia doesn't know that.

Isabelle is new where Maia knows her way around - Brooklyn is her kingdom.

"I'm Maia." She says and smiles a smile so bright Isabelle wants to sing. She smiles back. 

It's wrong - it's wrong, it's wrong. Isabelle is a timeless thing, never born - exists alongside time and dimensions, an impossible thing. She's a loveless thing.  _(she's in love)_

She's in love with the hue of Maia's skin and the shadow in her collar bones. The twitch of her upper lip when she smiles and the flutter of her eye lashes but she's in love with her beyond that - the energy, pulsating somewhere below her rib cage that only Isabelle can feel, can see. It shines through her eyes too. She hears it in her laugh.

Isabelle grows up and people find _her_ beautiful - people write her poems. Write her songs. People fall in love with her and she sees a future with her through their eyes and wants to tell them that she would destroy them. She's created for one person, bound for eternity. And instead of existing as an incomprehensible power of no shape or form, she fell in love - something so human. But people fall in love with her still. And she laughs. And smiles, and throws long black hair over her shoulder when she looks at them. And she kisses them and doesn't apologize when she leaves scorch marks on their walls.

But Isabelle only ever loves Maia.

The first time Maia kisses Isabelle it's a dare. They're seventeen and they're warm and pressed together, sitting on the floor of someone's living room. Isabelle is human, impermanently, and she can feel the premature buzz of intoxication in her finger tips. Isabelle knows people who don't know Maia - Isabelle is charismatic and beautiful, but Isabelle is also tethered to Maia Roberts in a way that's irrefutable if it's anything so friends of Maia are automatically friends of Isabelle and they're sitting in a circle of them, a bottle in the middle. Maia's slender, brown fingers are curved around it and she sends it spinning with a flick of her wrist _(Isabelle knows the term 'wax poetic' now and she thinks it's a beautiful concept)_. The bottle spins and the neck of it slows to a stop, pointing in Isabelle's reaction and she grins, laughs, because that is what she's supposed to do. That's what everyone else are doing, eyes bright and mischievous in golden light. 

Maia looks at Isabelle with raised eyebrows and there's one half of a question burning just behind her eyes.  _Are you sure_ , they seem to say, or maybe rather  _I'm game if you're game_ because this is Maia. Isabelle smiles back ( _if I am anything it would be yours)_ and cocks her head, nonchalant.

Maybe it's fate when Maia kisses Isabelle first, leaning forward in increments of eternities, lips curving up until they touch Isabelle's. Maybe it's Isabelle herself - the tug in her soul - but if it is, neither of them know it. If Isabelle tried she would feel the star powder on Maia's tongue but all she feels is skin, wet and burning. Her own skin is shaking now, slightly - or maybe it's her heart thrumming under it or maybe it's just her hands or maybe it's the earth itself, shivering around it's core and up through her legs, her ribs. Two of Maia's fingers touch the back of her hand, slide an inch up under her sleeve and it feels like an anchor. A wire, going from a place in the cosmos and through the top of her head, binding her to where she is, leaning against Maia. 

When they break a part, their friends are whispering, whistling, cooing, but Isabelle doesn't listen and she'd like to think Maia doesn't either.

It feels like a tipping point. Warm air and warm breath and warm blood, that night feels like a notch in a time line where everything that follows goes faster. They kiss again a week later and this time it's timid and careful, but Maia's hands and pressed against her waist, and her own are resting on Maia's shoulders and she feels  _bubbling_ in her chest, something fizzy and carbonated.

They're eighteen when Maia's fingers press against the buttons of her shirt, thighs on either side of her hips. There's a question in her eyes, but this time she says it out loud.

"Can I take your shirt off?"

Isabelle doesn't say  _if I am anything it would be yours_ , but she nods and smiles and whispers  _"Thought you'd never ask_ " and Maia laughs against her mouth.

It is a shameful thing, ( _the most beautiful thing)_ a pitiful thing. Isabelle is burning up a body from the inside to know human pleasure _(true love, purity, heaven)_  and it is a selfish thing. The feeling of Maia's skin against hers - so definite and yet so laughably small against the backdrop of an entire universe. Maia's bedsheets are an entire universe. The arch of Maia's back and thighs and foot soles are cosmic. Isabelle remembers the instantaneous expansion of the universe spread over fourteen billion years.

(s _he spends just as long trying to memorize Maia)_

It would be an entire life to Maia Robers. An entire life of gut feelings and kisses and hands to hold and lips to bite. And it's nothing to Isabelle. Not a second. Not a hundredth of a second. Not a thousandth, not any part of any part of any measurement of time. It's nothing. It is nothing to Isabelle. And it is absolutely everything to Isabelle.

" _God_ , you're so warm, you're always so warm." Maia says and Isabelle doesn't scold her for the blasphemy. Her skin shakes apart when Maia bites her way down her chest, sucks blood up under the place where it's thinnest, where it stretches over her breast bone. Later, Isabelle will look at the marks and try to rub it deeper, to etch it into her soul. She likes to think it is, in a way.

She learns the ways of Maia's body and how to make it sing something holier than avenging angels. She winds one hand under Maia's thigh to press it to the bed and reaches the other up and between her lips, offers two fingers to the warmth against her tongue. She presses her own to a spot that makes Maia shiver and feels her bite around her fingers - doesn't beg her to bite harder, to break through skin and flesh and bone. She wants creation itself to view her burnt and broken at the hands of mortality - fire, eternal, quenched by complete insignificance.

There is a stretch in the seam of Isabelle's own core that tells her this - that it's wrong ( _shameful, pitiful, blasphemic, selfish_ ) and even though it's simultaneously the most beautiful thing there is ( _the light of Maia's soul burning brighter than anything Isabelle has ever known, the purity of the love she feels, deep, deeply_ ) she knows what it is not - permanent. Fair. Isabelle has never existed outside of Maia, there's nothing in her life that makes sense without Maia and she will never know. And it isn't fair.

So maybe it's fate that introduces Maia to another girl - silver braids and narrow eyes and sharp teeth. Or maybe it's Isabelle _(the tug in Maia's soul that keeps her away from bad people lead her to the good ones just as often)_ but if it is, neither of them know it.

It's autumn when she leaves. Isabelle tears herself from Maia's life and leaves behind a smell of fire; cigarettes and rubber burnt into asphalt. Maia's hair keeps smelling of smoke, her bed sheets of forest fires. She's never known an Isabelle. She finds scorch marks on her body for the rest of her life.

 

**Author's Note:**

> this is a mess and written on my phone and it was absolutely not supposed to be an analogy for internalized homophobia so what the fuck.


End file.
